Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066231
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066231
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Moneyball

Moneyball PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057652
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The Oakland Athletics have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought. A story about money, science, entertainment, egos, "Moneyball" traces the remarkable success of the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league budget.

Moneyball

Moneyball PDF Author: Michael M. Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780786259687
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since -- well, since Lewis's Liar's Poker, Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. After mining all the obvious possibilities, Lewis was left with the mystery of how the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in baseball, won so many games. Here he records how general manager Billy Beane -- alone among Major League managers -- paid attention to some very humble statistics in order to find and field a team that nobody else wanted on the second-lowest payroll in baseball. Book jacket.

Who Was Muhammad Ali?

Who Was Muhammad Ali? PDF Author: James Buckley, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399540059
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. won the world heavyweight championship at the age of 22, the same year he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. He would go on to become the first and only three-time (in succession) World Heavyweight Champion. Nicknamed “The Greatest,” Ali was as well known for his unique boxing style, consisting of the Ali Shuffle and the rope-a-dope, as he was for the catchphrase “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He was an uncompromising athlete who brought beauty and grace to a very rough sport and became one of the world’s most famous cultural icons. Read Who Was Muhammad Ali? and discover “The Greatest.”

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393330478
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Story of Michael Oher, a rising gridiron star, who was rescued from the ghettos of Memphis and placed with a wealthy family to help develop his football skills.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract PDF Author: Bill James
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439106932
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 1026

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Book Description
When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.

Homegrown

Homegrown PDF Author: Alex Speier
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006294357X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
“Alex Speier spins a compelling narrative about how great scouting and player development created a perennial contender in baseball’s toughest division, without losing sight of the people at the heart of his story.” — Keith Law The captivating inside story of the historic 2018 Boston Red Sox, as told through the assembly and ascendancy of their talented young core—the culmination of nearly a decade of reporting from one of the most respected baseball writers in the country. The 2018 season was a coronation for the Boston Red Sox. The best team in Major League Baseball—indeed, one of the best teams ever—the Sox won 108 regular season games and then romped through the postseason, going 11-3 against the three next-strongest teams baseball had to offer. As Boston Globe baseball reporter Alex Speier reveals, the Sox’ success wasn’t a fluke—nor was it guaranteed. It was the result of careful, patient planning and shrewd decision-making that allowed Boston to develop a golden generation of prospects—and then build upon that talented core to assemble a juggernaut. Speier has covered the key players—Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Jackie Bradley Jr., and many others—since the beginning of their professional careers, as they rose through the minor leagues and ultimately became the heart of this historic championship squad. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and years of reporting, Homegrown is the definitive look at the construction of an extraordinary team. It is a story that offers startling insights for baseball fans of any team, and anyone looking for the secret to building a successful organization. Why do many highly touted prospects fail, while others rise out of obscurity to become transcendent? How can franchises help their young talent, in whom they’ve often invested tens of millions of dollars, reach their full potential? And how can management balance long-term aims with the constant pressure to win now? Part insider’s account of one of the greatest baseball teams ever, part meditation on how to build a winner, Homegrown offers an illuminating look into how the best of the best are built.

Sandlot Stats

Sandlot Stats PDF Author: Stanley Rothman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421408678
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
Sandlot Stats uses the national pastime to help students who love baseball learn—and enjoy—statistics. As Derek Jeter strolls toward the plate, the announcer tosses out a smattering of statistics—from hitting streaks to batting averages. But what do the numbers mean? And how can America’s favorite pastime be a model for learning about statistics? Sandlot Stats is an innovative textbook that explains the mathematical underpinnings of baseball so that students can understand the world of statistics and probability. Carefully illustrated and filled with exercises and examples, this book teaches the fundamentals of probability and statistics through the feats of baseball legends such as Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams—and more recent players such as Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, and Alex Rodriguez. Exercises require only pen-and-paper or Microsoft Excel to perform the analyses. Sandlot Stats covers all the bases, including • descriptive and inferential statistics • linear regression and correlation • probability • sports betting • probability distribution functions • sampling distributions • hypothesis testing • confidence intervals • chi-square distribution Sandlot Stats offers information covered in most introductory statistics books, yet is peppered with interesting facts from the history of baseball to enhance the interest of the student and make learning fun.

The Money Culture

The Money Culture PDF Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393066797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The classic warts-and-all portrait of the 1980s financial scene. The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of '29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade.

Cricket 2.0

Cricket 2.0 PDF Author: Tim Wigmore
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788851889
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 Winner of The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2020 Heartaches Cricket Book of the Year 'Fascinating . . . essential reading' – Scyld Berry 'A fascinating book, essential for anyone who wishes to understand cricket's new age' – Alex Massie, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 'An invaluable guide' – Mike Atherton, The Times 'excellent . . . both breezily engaging, and full of the format's latest, best and nerdiest thinking' – Gideon Haigh, The Australian 'The century's most original cricket book . . . An absorbing ride . . . some of their revelations come with the startling force of unexpected thunder on a still night' – Suresh Menon, editor Wisden India Almanack Cricket 2.0 is the multi award-winning story of how an old, traditional game was revolutionised by a new format: Twenty20 cricket. The winner of the Wisden Almanack Book of the Year award, the Telegraph Sports Book Awards' Cricket Book of the Year and selected as one of The Cricketer's greatest cricket books of all time, Cricket 2.0 is an essential read both for Test and T20 cricket lovers alike, and all those interested in modern sport. Using exclusive interviews with over 80 leading players and coaches – including Jos Buttler, Ricky Ponting, Kieron Pollard, Eoin Morgan, Brendon McCullum and Rashid Khan – Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde chronicle this revolution with insight, forensic analysis and story-telling verve. In the process, they reveal how cricket has been transformed, both on and off the field. Told with vivid clarity and insight, this is the extraordinary and previously misunderstood story of Twenty20, how it is reshaping the sport – and what the future of cricket will look like. Readers will never watch a T20 game in quite the same way again. "For people that love cricket it's really important to read it," said Miles Jupp. "I found it extraordinary."